Like ill-matched partners in a bad marriage,
American politics and American television seem bound inextricably together,
unable to escape a relationship that increasingly degrades both partners.
Television, "the business of selling audiences to advertisers,"
produces programs that at bottom are brightly colored conveyer belts carefully
designed to deliver to corporations particular segments of a mass market:
Ally McBeal's success lies in the efficiency with which it delivers the
"eyeballs" of young urban females to gaze upon the products
of L'Oréal, Monday Night Fooball's in how many middle-aged male
eyeballs it attracts for Budweiser and Chevrolet. Yet American politics,
however important its workings may be to the future of the republic, simply
does not deliver enough eyeballs. In order to obtain them, politicians,
like corporations, are forced to pay, forming a system that has left American
television increasingly rich, American politics increasingly corrupt,
and American voters increasingly ignorant. Television is the means by
which democracy has been absorbed by the market, producing a new hybrid:
call it "democracy commodified," and we have seen its emergence
this summer in its purest form yet.

It should have surprised no one that the three broadcast networks, which
still account for almost half the television audience, declined to offer
viewers more than a bare minimum—scarcely more than one minute in
ten—of coverage of the political conventions. "The parties have
designed these conventions, both of them, to be marketing tools—not
news events, but marketing tools," declared CBS's Dan Rather. "And
I'm not comfortable with trying to sell the audience on the idea that
they are something other than what they are. The argument that somehow
we have a 'moral responsibility' to carry the political parties' fogging-machine
infomercial—I don't buy it."

Rather, at sixty-eight, has covered a great
many conventions, including some that offered no important floor fights
and no real suspense about who the candidates were to be—that offered,
that is, "no news." Whatever his employer's supposed "moral
responsibility," he well remembers a time when the networks had a
clearly stated legal one, defined originally under the Communications
Act of 1934, which obliged broadcasters, on pain of losing their licenses,
to serve the "public interest, convenience and necessity." The
airwaves were public property, and if "selling audiences to advertisers"
was the rule of the business, Congress carved out an exception, a safe
zone in which news and politics and other information deemed essential
to the public could flourish protected from competitive pressures.

During the Reagan administration, this exception became in effect a dead
letter, sacrificed to the vast expansion of cable television and the deregulation
of the communications industry that came with it. The Clinton years brought
not its restoration but further growth and concentration in what we have
come to call "the media," leaving all of television, network
and cable, concentrated in the hands of a half-dozen multinational corporations
whose executives feel responsibility only to earn higher profits for their
shareholders. For all Mr. Rather's complaints about the political parties'
use of their conventions as "marketing tools," it is precisely
the parties' failures in marketing that have led the networks increasingly
to ignore them. Whatever the supposed "lack of news," it is
safe to say that if the conventions delivered as many eyeballs as Survivor,
CBS would broadcast them. And why not? Why should the networks subsidize
American politics?

One answer might be: Because American politics subsidizes American television—to
the tune, this year, of $600 million for the networks and broadcast stations
alone (not including cable). With the decline of local party organizations,
television has long since become the essential way—virtually the
only way—to reach voters. And as television time has become more
and more expensive, the American political world has come increasingly
to resemble Republican Rome, in which the wealthy and powerful expend
their largesse to make it possible for their chosen candidate to reach
and thereby seduce the masses.

American politicians have been forced to become a species of bagmen who
collect money from the wealthy and deliver it to television in order to
sell themselves to the voters. And voters, seeing the mounting piles of
money and the access and influence gained by those who supply it, grow
less and less willing to participate. And yet amid the sporadic but increasingly
angry debate about money in politics and about the need for campaign finance
reform, it is astonishing how infrequently television—and in particular
proposals to force the industry to offer free time to candidates—is
mentioned. For if it is the big donors who benefit first in the system
of corruption that is now the motor driving American politics, the television
industry comes a close second. The one thing hardly anyone on, or near,
television is interested in is criticizingtelevision itself.

Though television profits greatly from politics, it covers it grudgingly.
The network newscasts, once protected as "loss leaders" under
the "public-interest exception" but now under sharp pressure
to cut staff and deliver ratings, devote less and less time to national
politics: according to one survey, little more than half a minute an evening
during the month leading up to the decisive primaries last March. And
this "coverage," just like cable television's coverage of the
conventions, is dominated by personality and "strategy." As
a medium driven by images, television has never been particularly suited
to explaining issues or policies; but what strikes the viewer now is the
rigor with which broadcasters manage to keep these matters almost entirely
off the air. Even the Republicans' "Leave No Child Behind" night
in Philadelphia did not succeed in provoking any real discussion of Governor
Bush's record on education in Texas or his plans to extend these policies
if elected. And one might have been forgiven for assuming that the only
matter at issue for the Democrats in Los Angeles was whether Vice President
Gore could "step out of Clinton's shadow" or "re-introduce
himself to the American people."

Amid the ocean of commentary, of reporters
and commentators talking to one another about the political challenges
facing the candidates, it wasn't the small attention paid to issues and
policies that was striking but their almost total absence. Indeed, Mr.
Gore in particular seems to have taken advantage of precisely this, using
his hour of network time to deliver a speech crowded with specific proposals;
and, though many television commentators criticized the speech as "a
laundry list" or "a state of the union address," the sheer
information the Vice President managed to convey to voters who clearly
knew little about him helped him gain suddenly and dramatically in the
polls.

Personality, of course, is the currency of television; perhaps it is
not surprising that much of our political coverage, when it doesn't focus
on "spin," has the feel of Current Affair—or that, to accompany
what have become our quadrennial "pseudoevents," television
concentrates on the personal histories, quirks, and changing styles of
those who are "known for being known." Dan Rather affects to
disdain such a focus: "I'm a journalist," he says. "I'm
news. I wish it were otherwise, but there is not much news here. This
[convention] is a week-long political infomercial." In view of network
television's reluctance to cover politics and its preference for personality
and "horse-race" pieces when it does, Rather's disdain for the
"infomercial" seems misplaced, particularly when he uses it
to justify the networks' neglect of the conventions. News is not just
what is "new" or surprising or startling. News is information.
"Issues don't win elections, constituencies do," goes the old
saying; but issues are the means by which politicians attract constituencies.
If television is the business of selling audiences to advertisers, and
politics is the business of selling constituencies to candidates, then
issues are the television programs of politics: the means to attract voters.
Whether these are "traditional issues" used to secure a candidate's
base (affirmative action for Democrats, for example, or opposition to
abortion for Republicans) or "wedge issues" intended to break
off groups of disgruntled voters and attract them to the other party (the
"social issues" that helped Republicans lure away the so-called
"Reagan Democrats"), no issue can be effective unless it is
widely identified with a candidate. To sell himself to a voter, a candidate
needs to have a reliable means to deliver information to him about what
he stands for and what he plans to do if elected. That Gore was forced
to use his acceptance speech—the single hour of undivided television
time the networks will grant him during the entire campaign—to explain
his basic politics, and that voters, after a year of presidential campaigning,
greeted these policies as something of a revelation, suggests that the
candidates' voices are not reaching the broad public.

More than any other source, television is
where Americans look for their information, and increasingly television
does not provide it. When a bare 51 percent of voters were even aware
that the two major candidates have different positions (as poll-takers
from Pew Research Center found in June), this is not simply an indictment
of voters but a condemnation of television. When, after a year of campaign
coverage, the number of voters who think the candidates' stands are "similar"
has "grown" by more than a third, this suggests that television
is failing to inform Americans about what the candidates are saying. If
the inextricable embrace between politics and television has left television's
owners fat with profits and politicians beholden to large donors, it has
left voters not only alienated and bored but strikingly uninformed.

The networks, still far and away the country's dominant mass media, managed
to cover fewer minutes of the conventions than ever before, while keeping
Survivor and Big Brother firmly before the public and the profits those
programs earn streaming into shareholders' pockets. Now the main campaign
has begun, and during the commercial breaks between these and other programs,
viewers will be confronted by campaign commercials. Though for the big
donors' money makes it possible to buy time on the most expensive and
desirable programs—programs, like Survivor, that attract a lot of
eyeballs—the candidates will likely favor for their "media buys"
programs that deliver the eyeballs of certain key groups, in television
markets in certain "battleground" states: "soccer moms"
in Michigan, for example. These commercials will not be "news,"
of course, not in Dan Rather's sense, and the information they offer to
voters about the candidates will be of the sort a L'Oréal or Budweiser
commercial offers to viewers about its product. For most viewers who see
them, however, these commercials will be the main political information
they ever receive. After all, that's what the American business of democracy
commodified is all about.